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In the dreary round of petty details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no companions or any sympathy for the family of a hard-working New-England farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor the cowboys Corydons with no opportunity of retirement and cultivation, for reading and studying which is always voted 'stuff' under such circumstances the light suddenly quenches out of life, what was she to do?
So saying Dorothy left him to what consolation he could find in such china-pastoral abuse as the gallants of the day would, with the aid of poetic penny-trumpet, cast upon offending damsels Daphnes and Chloes, and, in the mood, heathen shepherdesses in general.
Perhaps that was the cause of it all. And then, she was very beautiful. In the autumn of that year we became great friends; and through her influence I began to see beyond the portals of the mansions of the rich. Matthew Prior's Chloes and Sir John Suckling's Euphelias lost their charms. Henceforth my muse's name became Phyllis.
And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star, all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before, go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most beauteous princesses!"
Liberty was the muse of Alfieri, Religion was the muse of Cowper. The same truth is found in their lighter pieces. They were not among those who deprecated the severity, or deplored the absence, of an unreal mistress in melodious commonplaces. Instead of raving about imaginary Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of Mrs. Unwin's knitting-needles.
Why should we wish for rhapsodies and commonplace love-making? We can leave all that to the Chloes and Daphnes of a by-gone age. It would be boring to the last degree. One must take pleasure just as much as sorrow, with a certain amount of equanimity. If there is one thing more than another that I hate, it is to be ruffled. Emotion of any sort ages a girl so terribly."
"I would like to put that girl in her place once!" thought Mrs. Salisbury. She began to wish that Justine would marry, and to envy those of her friends who were still struggling with untrained Maggies and Almas and Chloes. Whatever their faults, these girls were still SERVANTS, old-fashioned "help" they drudged away at cooking and beds and sweeping all day, and rattled dishes far into the night.
"Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate, I sing my plain country Joan, These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life, Blest day that I made her my own." Franklin's first public improvement carries us back to the early leathern-apron days of the Junto. But this plan proving hardly feasible, Franklin in the year 1731 drew up proposals for a city library.
And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion the Chloes and Narcissas of his day Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's "lovely young Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence.
II. Love dozes by the purling brook, No friend to lonely places; Or, if he toy with Strephon's crook, His Chloes are the Graces. III. Forsake 'The Flaunting Town! Alas! Be cells for saints, my own love! The wine of life's a social glass, Nor may be quaffed alone, love. IV. Behold the dead and solemn sea, To which our beings flow; Let waves that soon so dark must be Catch every glory now.
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